by Dee Lagasse
I don’t think it’s set in for any of us that we leave South Africa in twelve hours. None of us have packed or talked about it, like not saying something will allow us to push it back. The days have been spent with my best friend, not worrying about the pressure of the real world. And the nights? The nights have been spent in the arms of the man I am very quickly falling for.
The man who hasn’t said no once this week. He’s been everywhere and done everything anyone needed. He’s come back to the house at the end of the day with calluses on his hands, covered in dirt and sweat and still greets me with a kiss and a smile. Every night, despite working hard all day, he refuses to let me or Clementine clean the dinner dishes.
We took Wednesday afternoon off to go on a game safari on the conservation’s free-range land. After spending hours gawking and marveling at the simplistic beauty of grazing zebras, ostriches, wildebeest, and impalas, Bodie felt so guilty for taking a few hours to relax that he asked me to stop in town and bought enough beer and food to feed a small army. He spent the rest of the night cooking for everyone else while they relaxed.
When I asked him to come, I didn’t know volunteers were non-existent this week and the conservation needed all hands on. There was no hiding that we would put in some work while we were down here, but he’s more than done his fair share. And I’m glad he’s here. There’s no regret about asking him to come, but there is some guilt of my own building up. This wasn’t supposed to be a week of strenuous building, calloused hands, and sunburnt skin.
As I begin to think of ideas to make it up to him, Julie emerges from the small metal gate that separates two pieces of the electric fence.
“Oh good,” she beams. Her tear-stained face full of pride and love as she walks over toward me. “I was hoping you’d be awake. Cristina sent me to see if you wanted to come back. Kendi is in a spot that is visible, if you want to come see the cubs. Cristina said two at a time.”
“They’re here?!” I squeal, jumping up from my seat.
My excited squeak wakes Bodie immediately. Within seconds, he’s at my side, watching Julie wide-eyed too.
“Yes, there’s four of them,” Julie chuckles. “Come on, come meet your namesake.”
“My namesake?” I question.
All the commotion wakes up Clementine and Luke and they tell Bodie and me to go first.
“There are two females and two males,” Julie says as we walk back to the tree covered area Kendi is lying down in, four little balls of yellow and brown fur sit in between her legs. “So, we decided to name them after the four people that made this week possible - Sutton, Clementine, Bodie, and Luke.”
Picking up her head to see where the new noises came from, Kendi lays it back down exhaustedly when she sees there’s no threat to her new babies. They can’t see or walk yet and knowing how protective lionesses are of their cubs, Bodie and I stay far back. If Kendi and Nura hadn’t just come from a big name zoo and weren’t used to people the way they were, I wouldn’t even be in this enclosure.
Knowing Clementine and Luke are waiting too, we only stay for a few minutes. Once we trade places with them, I pretend I’m fine for a grand total of fifteen seconds before I let the tears fall freely. Concern covers Bodie’s face as he offers me his hands and pulls me up and into his arms.
“It’s just so much,” I tell him overwhelmed by all the emotions. “Seeing the cubs, knowing one of them is named after me, being here with you, knowing this week is almost over, not knowing where we stand going home…”
“Oh, Sutton,” he says, brushing a piece of hair out of my face. “My sweet Sutton.”
Planting a kiss on top of my head, he doesn’t say anything as I hold him tightly, crying over nothing and everything all at once.
“Look at me,” he says, tilting my chin up gently with two of his fingers when the tears begin to subside. “You are amazing. Every time I was introduced this week, it was as ‘Sutton’s boyfriend, Bodie’ and I’m telling you, I’ve been a lot of things in my life, but the beautiful, selfless Sutton Alloway-Dimarco’s boyfriend? I think that’s my new favorite title. Baby, everyone else disappears the very moment you’re in my sight. As soon as I walk into a room, you’re who I’m looking for. I’m tripping over my words and questioning every move I make because I’m terrified that you’re going to change your mind about us. I’m fucking crazy about you, you hear me?”
“Being with you and getting to be us without worry or repercussions of the world has made this week the best week of my life, Bodie. I don’t want it to end,” I sigh, letting my head rest on his chest. “It feels like this is the end.”
“Oh, babe, I promise you, we’re just getting started.”
Chapter 8
Bodie
There always comes a certain amount of unspoken pressure when you’re about to meet the family of the person you’re dating for the very first time. Though I bet it’s safe to say there’s just a bit more added on when you’re about to meet a future queen. Which is what I’m about to do.
It’s been almost two months since the night of the fundraiser in Boston. Two months since, on a whim, I invited an actual princess to my dad’s little cafe in Willoughby, Massachusetts. Fully expecting her to shoot it down right away, I didn’t have time to think about what was happening when she said yes.
After calling my dad to ask for the alarm code as I drove out of the city, I was too busy getting everything ready to focus on her title.
It wasn’t until she invited me to come on her birthday trip to South Africa did it really sink in. Before that night, when I heard the word “princess,” I thought of someone who was spoiled, demanding, and had everything handed to them. All it took was a few hours sitting across the table from Sutton Alloway-Dimarco to change that.
For starters, I’m certain there isn’t anyone on this earth that works harder than Sutton. Almost every day is planned out for her, and the ones that aren’t are spent working on her own projects and giving back in any way she can.
Kindhearted, dedicated, and genuine…that’s how I think of princesses now. At least this one. And after a week in South Africa with her, I would add selfless and passionate to that list. The love she has for the lions and the people at the sanctuary we spent the week at blew my mind. She was up every morning before the sun and crawled into bed long after it had set. Wherever she was needed, that’s where we were.
Everyone she met was greeted with a smile and a hug. At the end of the week, she presented the owners with a thirty-thousand dollar check and when the owner made the remark that Sutton does more than enough, Sutton shrugged.
“For my birthday this year, instead of gifts, I set up a small fundraiser knowing I would be coming down here. My family matched what I raised on my own,” she explained to two teary women. “No gift anyone could give me would mean more to me than knowing the lions were taken care of until I can come back in the spring.”
And it didn’t stop there. After we said our goodbyes to Cristina and Julie, we went back to the Pride House and I realized her luggage was noticeably lighter than it had been when we first arrived. I had carried all six suitcases in at one in the morning when we arrived, so when she only had half coming back home with her, there was no mistaking the difference.
With the same tone she had regarding the check she gave the sanctuary, she brushed it off. Looking away when I asked her about it, which in the short time we had spent together, I already knew that meant she was hiding something.
“What’d you do?” I laughed.
“Cristina and Julie needed new scrubs and shoes,” she admitted sheepishly, looking around before she lowered her voice and continued. “I knew they wouldn’t accept them, especially after the check. So I left a note attached to them and stuck them in the bedroom closet. I left the door open though, so someone will find them after we leave.”
I wasn’t sure who fascinated me more - the lions or Sutton.
By the time we left, I knew Sutton better than some of the peo
ple I had known for years. Saying goodbye to her at the airport had been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. And with the holidays approaching, we didn’t know when our schedules would line up again.
Little did I know though, was the moment she touched down in Windham, she had plans to meet with her parents. As soon as I texted her that I was back in Massachusetts, my phone had rung. It wasn’t a number I recognized, but it had been from the same country code as Sutton’s, so I answered it in fear something had happened to Sutton on the way home.
To my surprise, the voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as “Andre, the personal secretary of Her Royal Highness, Princess Sara of Windham.”
After having done my fair share of research, I recognized Sutton’s mother’s name immediately. The future queen of Windham was requesting telephone numbers for my dad, Oliver, and Nora so she could personally invite all of us to her home for New Year’s Eve.
Sure enough, twenty minutes later, I was the recipient of the first of four phone calls made to each member of my family. Later that night, Sutton told me that Nora had accepted immediately and tried to politely argue when Sutton’s mom asked for a bit of her personal information so they could book our flights. Oliver hesitated, but only until the invite was extended to his wife Helena too. My dad was the one she really had to convince though. Originally declining the invite with the excuse that he couldn’t leave the café for a week, it apparently took a forty-five-minute conversation and some serious coaxing from Sutton’s mother for him to agree to come.
Nora, Oliver, and I have been trying to convince my dad to take a vacation for a decade. He had always refused, saying he needed to be near the cafe. Even when it came to the three World Series I’ve played in, my dad only came to the home games in Boston. But somehow Sutton’s mother convinced him to let his business partner handle things for a week and now here he is, next to me, on a privately chartered airplane taking us clear across the Atlantic Ocean to meet my girlfriend and her family.
I swear out of the six of us, he’s the only one with no nerves. My sister and sister-in-law are worried about making good impressions, Oliver is nervous about flying across an ocean, and I’m worried I’m going to be coming back to America single because I’m not good enough for Sutton.
Up until now, the outside world seemed like a faraway place. This weekend, both of our worlds would collide, and it could go one of two ways.
Best case scenario, everyone gets along and likes each other. Sutton hasn’t met anyone in my family yet. After an hour-long video chat with Nora and Helena when she happened to call me when I was at my sister’s house, Sutton is convinced she, Clementine, Nora, Helena, and her sister Simone are going to become best friends.
My father has spent years working with the public and makes friends everywhere he goes, so I don’t doubt that he’ll do just fine…but, Oliver and me? We’re not royalty. We spent our childhood in grass-stained ripped jeans. There was no protocol or specific etiquette aside from saying “please” and “thank you.” We used cheap plastic Frisbees as baseball bases and our mode of transportation were BMX bicycles that we rode until they were falling apart.
“How you doing, Bo?” Oliver asks, calling me by my childhood name as he settles into his seat.
“As good as can be, Ollie,” I answer, calling him by his. “How about you?”
“Apparently I’ll be fine in about twenty minutes,” he laughs nervously, popping the cap of the medication his doctor had prescribed to him earlier this morning after Helena insisted that he make an emergency appointment.
He had argued with her about it to the point she felt so helpless that she called me.
“He’s making himself sick, Bodie. He’s panicking and says it feels like there’s a thousand-pound weight on his chest. But he keeps going on about manning up. I tried to tell him he’s the strongest man I know, but he just isn’t hearing me right now. I just need him to know it’s okay. That it’s okay to still need help.”
She knew coming to me would be what got him to the doctor’s…that I would be the only person that could possibly get through to him about something like this. That as sad as it was, it was only our family history that made it possible. Our history. Just mine and Oliver’s.
I was four years old when our mother committed suicide.
Oliver and I were spending the weekend at our dad’s house. Just like we’d been doing every other weekend since our parents divorced shortly after Oliver was born. I was so excited to see him and Nora, our big sister that we only got to see when we came to our dad’s.
At the time, I didn’t understand it, but I accepted that I had two parents, two homes, and a sister that didn’t live with me. I don’t remember my parents ever being together. There’s an album full of photos of my parents, me, and Oliver that I keep in my closet, but the photos stop right after Oliver’s first birthday.
Their divorce was an ugly one so I’ve been told. But just like their marriage, I don’t remember the divorce either. My earliest memories are of my aunt picking me up from my mom’s, driving Oliver and me to the Burger King in the middle of town on Friday nights, and my dad picking us up from there.
Once Oliver and I were all situated in the backseat of my dad’s station wagon, he would say, “Well, since we’re already here, how about a milkshake, fellas?”
It’s crazy what the mind remembers. Every other week, I got a chocolate milkshake and a chicken nuggets kid’s meal from the drive-thru, but I can barely remember anything about the woman that gave me life. Truth be told, the first thing that comes to mind when someone says her name, are four words.
“There was an accident.”
Then, I remember seeing my father, the man I thought was invincible, fall to his knees as I started screaming. I remember calling him a liar, spitting false accusations of hatred at him. When his own tears started falling, I realized he wasn’t lying and my whole world completely crumbled beneath me.
I remember crying myself to sleep in his arms and waking up at my grandparents’ house - the very same house I live in now. I remember chocolate chip cookies and peppermint hot cocoa. But I don’t remember my mother. I don’t remember what her laugh sounds like or if she had a favorite song. Did she sing to me and Oliver? Did we sit down and eat dinner together every night? Did she tuck me into bed and read me stories?
The next five years, I thought that my mother tragically died in a car accident. At four years old that’s what I equated to “an accident.” I was nine years old when my cousin was mad that I outsmarted him during a game, so to “get back” at me he made the comment, “Now I understand why your mom killed herself…to get away from you.”
Just like my dad five years earlier, I called him a liar. I was so mad that I punched him in the mouth, breaking one of his teeth. And that anger stayed with me for a long time. Though I understood why, I was mad at my dad for lying to me. But more than anything, I was mad at my mom for, in my mind, abandoning me.
That year, on Mother’s Day, my dad tried to do right by us, bringing us to her grave for the first time. Oliver brought her flowers and sobbed at her headstone. I refused to even look at it, standing at the car with arms crossed the entire time.
I didn’t think of her. Unless “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton came on, and even then, I turned it off as fast as it started. I pushed away the memory of her because I hated her for leaving me and the whole world behind.
And I held onto that anger for years. As I got older and began to understand more, slowly the anger dissipated. I won’t ever understand it, but twenty years of anger, slowly turned into guilt and then I started to acknowledge her in my life, because she deserved it. She deserved to be remembered. I’ll never know the why, but I’ll spend the rest of my life honoring her memory.
From that moment on, I was determined to do right by her. I use the platform I have to spread awareness, trying my damnedest to break the stigma about mental health. Especially after I started, and Oliver
admitted to me how much it meant to him and he’d been seeing a therapist and on anxiety medicine off and on for a few years now.
That’s why Helena knew she could come to me. After forty-five minutes, I got a little breakthrough with him, admitting that he’s been fighting the anxiety for a while and that the fear of flying was just a trigger for the latest of many panic attacks. Within an hour, we got Oliver in with his doctor, he left there with a prescription and a referral to a therapist.
As I look at my brother sitting across from me, I see anything but the weak man he thought we would see him as. I see a man who bends over backward for his family and his wife. I see the brilliant, genuine guy who created a multi-million-dollar sports management company based on his own personal merit.
And when I see him looking back at me as if taking the pills in his hands are some form of defeat, all I see is my baby brother looking at his big brother for reassurance that he’s not some kind of failure.
“Man, do whatever you need to do,” I tell him. “You’re badass.”
“Hey, how about we think of all the embarrassing stories about Bodie we’re going to tell all these royals?” Nora pipes in from the seat in front of Oliver.
It’s no surprise she had the perfect interjection. As we begin our ascent into the air, Oliver is in the middle of his retelling of the time we ripped all the heads off Nora’s Barbie dolls to use them as prisoners for our GI Joes and I screamed like a hyena as Nora chased me around the house trying to beat me with a rolling pin. Suddenly any worry I had about the weekend dissipated. There’s no way anyone couldn’t completely love every single one of them.
